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How technology is changing our choices and the values that help us make them.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Thinkstock

You're sitting at your desk, with the order in front of you that will enable the use of autonomous lethal robots in your upcoming battle. If you sign it, you will probably save many of your soldiers' lives, and likely reduce civilian casualties. On the other hand, things could go wrong, badly wrong, and having used the technology once, your country will have little ground to argue that others, perhaps less responsible, should unleash the same technology. What do you choose? And what values inform your choice?

We like to think we have choices in all matters, and that we exercise values in making our choices. This is perhaps particularly true with regard to new technologies, from incremental ones that build on existing products, such as new apps, to more fundamental technologies such as lethal autonomous robots for military and security operations. But in reality we understand that our choices are always significantly limited, and that our values shift over time in unpredictable ways. This is especially true with emerging technologies, where values that may lead one society to reject a technology are seldom universal, meaning that the technology is simply developed and deployed elsewhere. In a world where technology is a major source of status and power, that usually means the society rejecting technology has, in fact, chosen to slide down the league tables. (Europe may be one example.)

Take choice. To say that one has a choice implies, among other things, that one has the power to make a selection among options, and that one understands the implications of that selection. Obviously, reality and existing systems significantly bound whatever options might be available. In 1950, I could not have chosen a mobile phone: They didn't exist. Today, I can't choose a hydrogen car: While one could certainly be built, the infrastructure to provide me with hydrogen so I could use that vehicle as a car in the real world doesn't exist. Before the Sony Walkman, for example, no one would have said they needed a Walkman, because they had no idea it was an option.

Technology is changing far faster than the institutions we've traditionally relied on to inform and enforce our choices and values.

Moreover, in the real world no choice is made with full information. This is true at the individual level; if I could choose my stocks with full information, I would be rich. It is also true at the level of the firm, and governments: Investments and policies are formulated on best available information, because otherwise uncertainty becomes paralysis, and that carries its own cost.

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Values, the principles we live by, are equally complicated. They arise from many different sources: one's parents, cultural context, experiences, and contemplation of what constitutes meaning and the good life. Professions such as engineering, law, the military, and medicine all have formal and codified statements of ethics and values. In general, values systems tend to have two fundamental bases: absolute rules, such as the Ten Commandments of Christianity, or the goal of enhancing individual and social welfare, such as utilitarianism. In practice, most people mix and match their frameworks, adapting the broad generalizations of their ethical systems to the circumstances and issues of a particular decision.

Both choices and values rely on incomplete, but adequate, information. With inadequate information, choice may exist, but it is meaningless, because you don't know enough about what you are choosing to make a rational differentiation among options, and because the results of the choice are unknowable anyway. Without information, values become exercises in meaningless ritual. The Sixth Commandment is, after all, thou shalt not kill, but people do so all the time. Sometimes it is in a military operation, a form of killing that, done within the constraints of international law and norms, is generally considered lawful and ethical; sometimes it is the state responding to a criminal act with capital punishment; sometimes it is considered not justified and thus murder. It is the context-the information surrounding the situation in which the killing occurs-that determines whether or not the absolute rule applies. And utilitarianism obviously requires some information about the predictable outcomes of the decision, because otherwise how do you know that on balance you've improved the situation?

We are used to a rate of change that, even if it does make choices and values somewhat contingent, at least allows for reasonable stability. Today, however, rapid and accelerating technological change, especially in the foundational technological systems known as the Five Horsemen-nanotechnology, biotechnology, information and communication technology, robotics, and applied cognitive science-has overthrown that stability. The cycle time of technology innovations and the rapidity with which they ripple through society have become far faster than the institutions and mechanisms that we've traditionally relied on to inform and enforce our choices and values.

The results so far aren't pretty. One popular approach, for example, is the precautionary principle. As stated in the U.N. World Charter for Nature, this requires that (Section II, para. 11(b)) "proponents [of a new technology] shall demonstrate that expected benefits outweigh potential damage to nature, and where potential adverse effects are not fully understood, the activities should not proceed." Since no one can predict the future evolution and systemic effects of even a relatively trivial technology, it is impossible in any real-world situation to understand either the adverse or positive effects of introducing such a technology. Accordingly, this amounts to the (unrealistic) demand that technology simply stop. Some activists, of course, avoid the intermediate step and simply demand that technologies stop: This is the approach many European greens have taken to agricultural genetically modified organisms and some Americans have taken toward stem cell research. The environmental group ETC has called for "a moratorium on the environmental release or commercial use of nanomaterials, a ban on self-assembling nanomaterials and on patents on nanoscale technologies."

While on the surface these may appear to be supremely ethical positions, they are arguably simply evasions of the responsibility for ethical choice and values. It is romantic and simple to generate dystopian futures and then demand the world stop lest they occur. It is far more difficult to make the institutional and personal adjustments that choice and values require in the increasingly complex, rapidly changing world within which we find ourselves. It is romantic and simple to demand bans and similar extreme positions given that, in a world with many countries and cultural groups striving for dominance, there is little if any real chance of banning emerging technologies, especially if they provide a significant economic, technological, military, or security benefit.

What is needed, then, is some way to more effectively assert meaningful choice and responsible values regarding emerging technologies. There are at least two ways that are already used by institutions that face both "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns": scenarios, and real-time dialog with rapidly changing systems. Scenarios, which are not predictions of what might happen, are like war games: They provide valuable experience in adaptation, as well as opportunities to think about what might happen. An interesting additional form of scenario is to engage science fiction in this regard. Good science fiction often takes complex emerging technologies and explores their implications in ways that might be fictional, but can lead to much deeper understanding of real-world systems.

Real-time dialog means that institutions that must deal with unpredictable, complex adaptive systems know that there is no substitute for monitoring and responding to the changes that are thrown up by complex systems as they occur: Responsible and effective management requires a process of constant interaction. Such a process is, of course, only half the battle; the other is to design institutions that are robust enough, but agile enough, to use real-time information to make necessary changes rapidly. What is ethically responsible is not just fixation on rules or outcomes. Rather, it is to focus on the process and the institutions involved by making sure that there is a transparent and workable mechanism for observing and understanding the technology system as it evolves, and that relevant institutions are able to respond to what is learned rapidly and effectively.

It is premature to say that we understand how to implement meaningful choice and responsible values when it comes to emerging technologies. Indeed, much of what we do today is naive and superficial, steeped in reflexive ideologies and overly rigid worldviews. But the good news is that we do know how to do better, and some of the steps we should take. It is, of course, a choice based on the values we hold as to whether we do so.

On Friday, March 6, Arizona State University will host "Emerge: The Future of Choices and Values," a festival of the future, in Tempe. For more information, visit emerge.asu.edu. Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and ASU.

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five horsemen of the apocalypse technology

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How Technology Is Changing Our Choices and the Values That Help Us Make Them

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How technology is changing our choices and the values that help us make them. You're sitting at your desk, with the order in front of you that will enable the use of autonomous lethal robots in your upcoming battle. If you sign it, you will probably save many of your soldiers' lives, and likely reduce civilian casualties.

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It has become customary to talk of "technology" as if it were a special sector of the economy consisting of the manufacture of sophisticated electronic goods, the creation of software, and the provision of services reliant on information and communications technology.

Some roles may go, but technology will not get rid of work

This is a ludicrously narrow definition. Every technique human beings have invented, from the stone axe onwards, is "technology". The ability of humans to invent technologies is their defining characteristic. Furthermore, new general purpose technologies, such as the computer and the internet, have effects that fall far outside the technology sector, narrowly defined.

We need to assess contemporary innovations in their broader context. Here are seven points about these changes.

First, the penetration of recent innovations in communications technology has been astonishingly rapid. At the end of 2015, there were more than 7bn mobile phone subscriptions, a penetration rate of 97 per cent, up from around 10 per cent in 2000. Penetration of internet access grew from 7 per cent to 43 per cent over the same period. (See chart.)

Economically, this has led to the rise of ecommerce, the transformation of industries whose products can be converted into "bits" (music, film and news media, for example) and the rise of the "sharing economy". Socially, it has altered human interactions. Politically, it has affected relationships between the rulers and the ruled.

Second, a substantial "digital divide" exists. In 2015, 81 per cent of households in the developed world had internet access, the proportion in all developing countries was 34 per cent and the proportion for the least developed countries was a mere 7 per cent.

Information is power. It is not yet clear whether the rapid spread of access will prove more important than the persistent differences in its availability. But there is reason for optimism. The ability to leapfrog poor communication and financial networks has already transformed some developing countries.

Third, the arrival of the internet and mobile phones has failed to generate a sustained upturn in the growth of productivity. This is shown best by the US, the leader in the development of the new technologies and, for more than a century, the world's most productive and innovative large economy.

Output per hour worked in the US grew at rate of 3 per cent a year in the 10 years up to 1966, after which the growth rate declined, falling to just 1.2 per cent in the 10 years to the early 1980s. After the launch of the worldwide web, the moving average rose to 2.5 per cent in the 10 years to 2005. But it then fell to just 1 per cent in the decade to 2015.

A decomposition of the sources of growth in productive capacity underlines the point. Over the 10 years up to and including 2015, the average growth of "total factor productivity" in the US - a measure of innovation - was only 0.3 per cent a year.

We should not be surprised. As Robert Gordon of Northwestern University argues, clean water, modern sewerage, electricity, the telephone, the radio, the petroleum industry, the internal combustion engine, the motor car and the aeroplane - all innovations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries - were far more transformative than the information technologies of the past 75 years.

Some argue, against this, that statisticians are failing to measure output correctly, partly by failing to capture free services, such as search, which generate vast unmeasured surplus value.

Yet it is not at all clear why statisticians should have suddenly lost their ability to measure the impact of new technologies in the early 2000s. Again, most new technologies have also generated vast unmeasured surplus value. Think of the impact of electric light on the ability to study.

Fourth, the new technologies have reinforced tendencies towards greater inequality, in at least three respects. One is the rise of "winner-takes-all" markets in which a few successful people, businesses and products dominate the world economy. Another is the rise of globalisation. A last is the explosion in financial trading and other rent-extracting financial activities.

Some argue that the arrival of robots and artificial intelligence will transform labour markets, rendering even quite sophisticated skills redundant. This could, if true, generate divisions between the owners of the robots and the rest of the population as fundamental as those between landowners and landless labourers.

Fifth, the rise of global communications, of our reliance on cyberspace, of behemoth technology-enabled corporations and of "big data" raises difficult questions about privacy, national security, the ability to tax and, more broadly about the relationship between governments, corporations and individuals.

Sixth, the rise of pluralistic interactive media is affecting politics. Wider access to knowledge is a potential boon. But the new technologies can also be used to disseminate lies, hatred and stupidity.

Finally, technologies are tools. They offer opportunities and dangers. What we make of them is, as always, up to us.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017. All rights reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

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It has become customary to talk of "technology" as if it were a special sector of the economy consisting of the manufacture of sophisticated electronic goods, the creation of software, and the provision of services reliant on information and communications technology. Some roles may go, but technology will not get rid of work This is a ludicrously narrow definition.

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Change in Human Behaviors Benefits of Technology

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Change in Human Behaviors Benefits of Technology

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The use of technology is increasing day by day, we all depend on technology, and we use various technologies to accomplish specific tasks in our lives. Today we have various emerging technologies that impact our lives in different ways. Technology is being implemented in almost every aspect of our lives and business function. So embracing it and learning how to use technology in whatever we do is very important and recommended. As the world keeps on developing, technology will change, what is working today might not work tomorrow. So it is better to stay up-to-date with new emerging technologies and learn how to embrace and use them in your daily life.

The Uses of Technology Today

Today businesses can save money by using technology to perform numerous tasks. When you compare the amount of money spent on hiring an individual to perform a certain task and the training necessary to be able to perform that function consistently, it is costly. When it comes to technology, a small business can scale out and consistently deliver more at high quality with less human resources, often equating less cost.

1. Car manufacturing has increasingly utilized more robotics in the creation of the car frame and its parts. this has resulted in greater speed and build quality.

2. Many retail stores and empires no longer track inventory manually. Through the use of Information systems, they are able to accurately track current inventory and needed inventory. Saving time and money. Additionally, some systems are able to communicate with suppliers to let them know when to deliver more goods, this results in always stocked shelves

3. Most businesses today make use of biometric or RFID time attendance systems to accurately monitor worker arrival and departure times.

Businesses need to use technology to speed up their services and cut down on costs. Though technology can't do certain things, it increases efficiency and reduces cost.

Unlike in the past when communication was limited to letter writing and waiting for those postal services to deliver your message. Today technology has made the field of communication easy. Now you can draft a business message and email it or fax it in an instant.

T echnology has made business meetings so simple, with the introduction of video conferencing; you no longer have to worry to be late for a business meeting. Now with this video conferencing technology, you can be in the meeting in a virtual form and engage with your partners directly.

Examples of Technology in Communication

Video Conferencing

Allows for simple real-time communication between two parties.

Sites for Video Conferencing

Emails

I don't need to say much about this. We all have one and treasure this form of communication technology. Many people cannot function without the use of their emails. It is a critical form of communication technology used by the simplest person to the President.

Email Providers

Business and personal communication is essential for the operation of the globe. We all feel like we need to make use of it daily.

As the world develops, people are getting more carried away with their work and cares. Today a lot is demanded, so everyone is too busy and have no time for finding a relationship. So technology has also filled this part. With technology, you can connect and meet new people while at work using social network technology. You can also use technology to find a new date without living your work. Nowadays people use mobile phone apps to meet and connect with new and old friends. Social networks like Facebook.com, Tagged.com have played a big role in connecting both old and new relationships.

However, virtual relationships are not as strong as physical relationships, so I advise you to take off time and meet these people you network with virtually and get to know each other better. On the other note, people who over participate in virtual relationships, end up with no friends in real life, and they develop a disease called cyber-sickness and loneliness.

Examples of Technology in Human Relationships

Virtual Dating

Virtual dating has become a new and exciting experience for those looking for love. Many providers, both websites and apps, have promised by means of there proprietary algorithms they can find you love. Thus many millions have registered to be matched with their " soul mate."

Virtual Dating Sites and Apps

Match.com: This website has connected thousands of people in the world, even resulting in real marriages.

Eharmony: This website assures clients that they look at partners for longterm relations, users typically recommend Eharmony.

Bumble: This app is popular among Android users.

Technology has affected even the intimate areas of our personal lives. Though people have success on these sites and apps, I still recommend meeting someone the old fashion way.

Today, technology has made a very big change in the education world, with the invention of technology gadgets and mobile apps it is easier than ever for students to learn. Nowadays you can access a full library of educational material via a mobile app or website on any smartphone or iPad. Before inventing this technology, students had to go to physical libraries to get the information they need.

Examples of Technology in Education

Coursera- Basically learn everything you want with this app. Browse 1000+ courses in a variety of subject areas, math, to music, medicine, programming, computer science etc.

Khan Academy- Like Coursera Khan Academy is well known. It has over 10,000 videos and explanations at your fingertips in math, science, finance, programming and a lot more

Duolingo - (The best language-learning app" -The Wall Street Journal) Learn English, Spanish, French, Danish, Swedish, Russian, Ukrainian, etc. some of which you may never really use. But I always say a next language is never a bad thing. Check it out its awesome.

Gadgets for Education

In Conclusion

The list is endless, but this is a good example to show you that technology has made education simple.

Technology has also made the buying and selling of goods and services so flexible and a lot safer. With the introduction e-payment systems, users can easily purchase anything online without leaving the comfort of their homes, they no longer need to overly worry about sending credit card information to a vendor.

Examples of Technology in Purchasing

EMV Smart Chips

Once upon a time, credit card owners feared losing their cards as the thief merely needed to swipe and fake a signature to empty it. Now Credit Cards with smart chip technology rather than sign a hard copy of the receipt, the chip and pin system, instead requires a PIN like an ATM. If the PIN doesn't match, your purchase doesn't go through. Thus this system is more secure.

Online Payments Providers

Paypal - The most widely used payment provider in the USA. This giant of a provider has allowed for payment at thousands of popular websites without the need to enter your credit card details. Keeping your payment secure and safe. It simply requires an email and password to pay.

Google Wallet - Google's Payment solution, like PayPal, Google simply requires your Google account to pay, not as widely used as PayPal however.
In Conclusion
Do not worry you can buy that cool shoe or watch online, the technology used daily today is much safer than it was 10 years ago, still be cautious.

Also, technology has changed the agricultural industry by replacing human labor with machines that are operated or controlled by people or other machines. In the agricultural industry, productivity is a key factor. If production is high, the farmer will make more profits. Technology has helped farmers replace the old ways of farming with machines that can do the job in less time right from the day of planting to the day of harvesting. Let's take a simple example. An animal-drawn plow replaced the digging stick. Then later, that plow was replaced by the horse-drawn moldboard plow. Currently, we have the large tractors that pull complex tilling machines. But, even these machines are being replaced by no-till or minimum-till farming practices, which reduce the amount of work it takes to prepare the soil for planting.

Examples of Technology in Agriculture

Machinery

Apps
FamGraze
With the invention of Mobile App for farmers, they can use an App like "FamGraze" to work faster and be more accurate while in the field and off the field. For example, "FamGraze" app will help a farmer manage their grass more effectively by suggesting the cheapest feed for their livestock. This app will calculate the amount of grass your animals have in the field. You will need no paper or any spreadsheets to do all this. Saving you more time while in the field.

In Conclusion

Agriculture has benefited significantly from technology. It has increased efficiency and quality of work done, resulting in greater harvest and more profits.

The use of technology in banking is the backbone of society today. Most banks now offer online banking facilities. Millions make use of this service daily to manage their finances. Most businesses also use this feature to pay employees and transfer money. Many individuals and companies are reliant on this option to function. Additionally, security has significantly benefited as these banking systems do their best to ensure there are firewalls and limits in place to reject any curious hacker.

Examples of Technology in Banking

E-Banking Providers

This list is endless. The best suggestion is to check your nearest banking provider I am almost positive they have online banking.

ATMS

These lifesavers allow for the quick convenient withdrawal of our money. No need to enter a back or call ahead. Quick and easy. only requires a simple pin to access.

Banking APPS

Banks like Chase, Wells Fargo, RBC and PNC all have mobile apps to access your banking and investment details easily, wherever and whenever you are on the go.

Transportation is one of the basic areas of technological activity. Both businesses and individuals have benefited from the new technologies in the travel industry. Time is money, so we must have a fast and efficient mode of transport. Try to imagine life without a well-developed transportation system. Transportation is the food, clothing, and shelter of society. It has become a basic need of every society. It assists with the essential transfer of necessary services and goods for all industries, some of which is required for a populations existence. However, transportation technology has changed dramatically since 1800 to recent years. Let's take a good example in the picture below.

Examples of Technology in Banking

Trains

Electric and Hybrid Vehicles

There has been an extreme rise if electric and hybrid vehicles. They promise greater gas mileage, an environmentally responsible and all-around less expensive vehicle.

Tesla Motors- Tesla Motors is the big boy of the fully electric car world. They have showrooms all around the world and a very faithful following.

Toyota Prius - The biggest contender in the hybrid industry. It has been faithfully performing and surpassing expectations since 1997. Its never the best looking but it makes up in performance and saving.

In Conclusion

Transportation technology continues to advance with a possible autonomous vehicle soon to come. Despite these advancements, country laws still require adjusting if the technology used today and intended for tomorrow is to progress.

New Technologies We Should Use in Our Daily Lives

Image from: Kickstarter.com

In our everyday life we have to monitor our diet, and what we eat, it is very essential to keep track of what you put inside your body. This HAPIfork is a smart fork that tracks what you're eating habits. For those who want to lose weight, this smart fork technology will help you eat healthier, and it will also determine the speed at which you eat. If you monitor the speed at which you're eating, you will improve your digestion system and also reduce your weight.

So how does this HAPIfork improve your eating habits and health?

- HAPIfork will monitor and reduce the speed at which you eat your meals. This process will teach you to maintain healthier and smarter eating habits.

Learn more about HAPIfork from here.

Image from: Kickstarter.com

It is very important to keep your data secure and accessible from anywhere. Today we have many online data storage companies which provide you with limited space to store your data, they even limit you on which data to store on their cloud servers, now, this Space Monkey will cut out all that mess, it is a cool device which takes cloud data storage from remote data-centers and it brings it to your house or office, so you will be in control of what you store on Space Monkey, forget about server loads or network threats, space monkey is safe and you will be in position to access your data remotely. When it comes to cost, you will spend only $10 for 1000 Gigabytes of storage space.

Learn more about Space Monkey from here.....

Image from:imsmart.com

Communication technology is advancing on a daily basis. In our daily lives, we need to communicate and stay updated in real-time. This smartwatch will derive all important notification from your smartphone to your wrist.This smart watch has almost every essential feature you will need to stay updated, so why bother carrying the wide screen uncomfortable smartphone when this simple, wearable Smartwatch will bring you all calls, SMS, e-mails, and more notifications directly to your wrist. This is a cool technology for busy people who always want to stay updated. The price of this Smartwatch has been reduced to $299, which is quite affordable. With this new technology, you can leave your smartphone in your pocket or purse, and get all updates via this smart watch.

Learn more about this I'm Watch communication technology from here.......

Image from: firebox.com

Keeping time is very important in our daily lives; however, waking up in the morning is a disaster for most of us. This Flip Alarm clock uses a simple but cool technology to wake you up, with its big bold design, it comes with two sides - ON and OFF - which means that you can flip the clock on the side you need, then its advanced timing technology will sense when to wake you up, if the alarm starts making that wired noise to wake you up in the morning, you tell the clock to shut up by flipping it to the OFF side. Learn more about this Flip Alarm Clock from here........

5. Luci Inflatable Solar Lantern:

Image from: firebox.com

Since light is essential in our lives, this Luci Inflatable Solar Lantern is among those new technologies everyone will need in their lives. Take advantage of solar energy with this remarkable lightweight waterproof solar lantern. For those who love camping, this lantern will provide you with light during the night. If you charge it for 8 hours, you will get a minimum of 6 -12 hour of light. Learn more about this Luci Inflatable Solar Lantern from here.....

In conclusion:

The use of technology is unmeasurable; technology has played a big role in many other fields like health care, Job Creation, and Data management. And this technology will keep on changing based on the demands of people and the market. So it's your role to keep your self-up-to-date with trending technology.

How we use technology determines if it's good or bad, helpful or harmful. Technology, itself, is neutral. But it is us who make it good or bad based on how we use it.

Society makes choices among many alternatives. Each person makes a decision that influences the choice society makes ( U.S. Department of Energy, Bud Smith). So the way we choose to use technology will determine if it will benefit us positively or harm us in the long run.

This article was last updated on 8th-06-2013

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Serious research has been undertaken to publish this content, so you're in the right place. I love technology, I believe embracing its potential for personal, business or educational advancement will pave the way forward for us all. We've all heard "knowledge is power", with this website I hope, to some degree, to empower you!

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10 Uses of Technology in Our Daily Life - Use of Technology

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The use of technology is increasing day by day, we all depend on technology, and we use various technologies to accomplish specific tasks in our lives. Today we have various emerging technologies that impact our lives in different ways. Technology is being implemented in almost every aspect of our lives and business function.

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Intelligence has always been coveted and sought after. It's clear that a high quality education is a common value we share in the United States and around the world. This is seen in households and in law. For example, President Obama recently put forth a proposal for universal preschool. Access to a good education is just as important for grade school kids as it is for the students seeking a college degree, and it would be hard to find someone who doesn't agree that everyone has a right to get that education.

But while we have such reverence for education, schools struggle. Test scores drop, teachers are laid off, programs are cut, and the quality of education varies greatly from school to school. So what can be done to save schools that are falling behind the public's standards -- or dreams -- of quality learning? It seems that our current obsession with technology and electronics may have the benefits in education struggling classes need to get back on track.
Personalizing Education
It's frustrating to be in a classroom where there are students at very different levels and needs to a degree where it's impossible for one teacher to cater to each student as they deserve. A teacher's job is just as much about knowing the students and understanding how to improve an individual's learning abilities as it is about teaching students about algebra, photosynthesis, or how to use a semicolon correctly. Studies have found that a technology rich classroom is the perfect place for that level of specialized learning. When teachers and students are trained to use the technology, there are many tools to help track growth, give extra resources, and accelerate learning based on each student's unique pace. The first step to improving education as a whole is realizing that there is no cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all education that will work for every student. From there, technology can offer tools for defining unique education.

One of the major benefits of introducing technology into the classroom is the effect it has on the students. In traditional teaching (lecturing, working from a textbook, and taking notes, for example), it's easy for students to fall into a passive role. Even the best students who have a natural passion for learning can have trouble paying attention to a teacher's lecture. But when technology is involved, students are more likely to be engaged in learning. Students need to press buttons, think out problems, and manipulate the tools they have to achieve a goal. Educational technology can improve focus among students and it caters to students who learn independently and to those who are more collaborative.
The Endless Benefits of Technology and Learning
It's true that adapting to new technology in the classroom takes some time and requires trial and error before teachers and students can start to see results. But once teachers get used to using technology in their lesson plans and when students perfect the skills needed to be successful with that technology, the results are quite impressive. Technology has proven to accelerate struggling students close the learning gap between those at the back of the class and the A-students. In fact, 78 percent of Kindergarten through Middle School teachers agree that technology has had a positive impact on their classroom -- and that's just the start.

Including technology in the classroom gives teachers more options and tools to cater to each student individually. Technology can improve focus and boost students' self-esteem, not to mention teach them valuable skills like fast, accurate typing and using online search engines to find trustworthy sources for research. It's difficult for under-funded schools to find the resources to bring technology into the classroom, but there are organizations and grants available to schools all over the world that are there for just that. With a supportive community and teachers who are willing to be trained and embrace technology in their classes, students of every age are sure to benefit from the many tools and skills technology can offer.

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A Look at Recent Findings on Technology in the Classroom

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Intelligence has always been coveted and sought after. It's clear that a high quality education is a common value we share in the United States and around the world. This is seen in households and in law. For example, President Obama recently put forth a proposal for universal preschool.

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We all know that using a cell phone can stimulate the brain to work a bit harder. "Mr. Skerrett? This is Dr. LeWine's office. Do you have a minute to talk about your test results?" or "Dad, a bunch of kids are going to Casey's house after the dance. Can I go?" But a new study published in JAMA is making me wonder what the energy emitted by the phone itself, not just the information it delivers, is doing to my brain.

Here's the study in a nutshell. Dr. Nora Volkow and her colleagues recruited 47 volunteers to have their brain activity measured twice by a PET scanner. Both times the volunteer had a cell phone strapped to each ear. During one measurement, both phones were turned off. During the other, one phone was turned on but muted so the volunteer didn't know it was on; the other was left off. Each session lasted about an hour. The scans showed a small increase in the brain's use of glucose (blood sugar) when the phone was on, but only in parts of the brain close to the antenna.

It was an elegant study. The researchers took pains to anticipate sources of error. They used a control (both phones off) against which to compare the effect of a "live" cell phone. They used cell phones on each ear, one on and one off, to see if the effect was localized. They muted the phone that was on to eliminate the possibility that any brain activation was due to listening to the sound of a voice coming through the phone's speaker. So the result is probably a real one, not an artifact or measurement error.

What does this brain activation mean? No one really knows. As Dr. Volkow told NPR, "I cannot say if it is bad that they [cell phones] are increasing glucose metabolism, or if it could be good."

The big worry, of course, is brain cancer, not brain activation. It's a controversial and hotly debated topic. But with conflicting evidence linking cell phone use with brain cancer, this study will probably push the debate in both directions. Some will see the results as reassuring-the brain activation during the 50 minutes the one cell phone was on was less than that seen when you open your eyes or listen to music. Others will see the brain activation as a possible early step toward cancer.

I'm with Dr. Volkow and others who think that this study means it's worth taking a closer look at how the energy radiated by a cell phone, a mobile phone, or any other energy-emitting device we hold next to our heads affects the brain. I'm also going to avoid 50-minute conversations by cell phone (the duration in the study) and save those for when I'm using a head set or my old-fashioned, noncordless land line.

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Cell phone use stimulates brain activity - Harvard Health Blog

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An elegant new study showing that a cell phone can stimulate brain activity is certain to heat up the debate about whether or not cell phone use is linked to cancer.

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These 5 Facts Explain How Technology Is Shaping Our World

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5 facts that explain how technology affects inequality, climate, education, health and security

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How Technology Helps Us in Our Daily Lives

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Read on for the many ways technology helps families to streamline activities, save time and organize schedules.

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Whether it's the technology that allows us to peer deep into the body or medicines that extend the lives of those with chronic diseases, it's easy to see how advances in health and medicine have touched the lives of nearly every person on the planet.

Yet considering the ubiquitous nature of these developments, it is easy to see how many people take for granted the technologies and practices that, at one point or another, almost certainly saved their own lives or the lives of people they've loved.

The list below encompasses 10 advances in health and medical practices that have changed -- and in many ways continue to change -- the world today.

Vaccines

Throughout history, communicable diseases have had a tremendous impact on human history. So too, then, has the development of one of the most effective ways to defend against rampant viral infection -- vaccination.

Dr. Edward Jenner first introduced the idea of vaccinations in 1796, when he successfully prevented a young English boy from getting smallpox.

The concept of vaccination was propelled further by scientists such as Louis Pasteur, and in the modern era, when large groups of soldiers were successfully vaccinated in World War I and II against such diseases as tetanus, diphtheria and typhus.

"Polio vaccine is one that people think of because it had such an impact," said Dr. Jeffrey Baker, director of the history of medicine program at the Duke University School of Medicine.

But from the global health standpoint, Baker said Jenner's introduction of the smallpox vaccine may have had an even more significant impact in terms of lives saved.

Surgical Anesthetic and Antisepsis

Without a doubt, surgery used to be a much graver proposition than it is today. One of the chief reasons for this is that before the middle of the 19th century, anesthetic simply wasn't an option.

That changed Oct. 16, 1846, when William T.G. Morton demonstrated the mysterious wonder of ether -- a substance powerful enough to dull the pain and agony that had long been associated with surgery.

But while anesthetic was a great advance in and of itself, another advance that occurred at roughly the same time may have been even more beneficial -- antisepsis, or the creation of a sterile surgical environment.

"Anesthetic made it possible to operate on a patient without pain," Baker notes, "but without antisepsis they'd die anyway."

Clean Water and Improved Sanitation

Put them beside surgical advances and other cutting-edge technologies, and public health measures don't look so sexy. But the fact is that clean water and sanitation have likely saved millions -- perhaps billions -- of lives since they were widely implemented in the 19th and 20th centuries.

"It's something that's so important around the world and in America," Baker said. "It used to be that 15 percent of infants would die, and the biggest reason for this was diarrhea brought about by unclean water and milk."

Clean water and public health measures dramatically cut down the incidence of such deadly water-borne diseases as cholera and improved sanitation, drastically lowering the health impacts of parasitic infections and other health conditions related to the environment.

Antibiotics and Antivirals

As with vaccination, the advent of antibiotics hailed a new era in the treatment of communicable disease.

Interesting, then, that the concept of antibiotics may have been uncovered accidentally. In 1928, Sir Alexander Fleming left a petri dish of Staphylococci bacteria uncovered and later noted that the bacteria had been killed by a mold.

Upon further studying the mold, he discovered it was from a family called Penicillium notatum. Others soon saw the potential uses of what later came to be known as penicillin.

Today, antibiotics are used to treat a plethora of bacterial illnesses. And today, researchers are developing antivirals -- most notably, the AIDS-fighting antiviral AZT -- to deal with a host of viral illnesses as well.

The Birth Control Pill

Arguably, few developments have had as profound a social impact as the introduction of the birth control pill -- though its path to widespread use has been a rocky one.

Although the Federal Drug Administration approved contraception as safe in the early 1960s, it only became legal for married couples in 1965 and for unmarried couples in 1972.

But because of the Pill, countless women have been given control over their own fertility -- a concept that created a social revolution.

"Thinking about how it has transformed women's lives, in terms of family planning and the entry of women into the work force, its impact has been significant indeed," Baker said. "It was the first-ever lifestyle drug. It's not treating a disease, but it was making life better for women."

Improvements in Heart Surgery and Cardiac Care

Heart disease remains at the top of the list of the country's killers. Despite this, numerous important advances in its treatment have made a considerable impact, extending and improving the lives of its sufferers.

Not the least of these advancements is surgeons' ability to operate on and repair the heart -- without putting the patient at an unreasonable amount of risk.

"Maybe the breakthrough moment was the rise of the heart-lung bypass, which made it possible to operate on the heart for more than just a few minutes at a time," Baker said. "This was followed by coronary artery bypass grafting, which is, I believe, a most important procedure."

Randomized Controlled Trials

Another development largely unnoticed by the public at large, the advent of the randomized controlled trial -- what many refer to as the gold standard of medical research -- gave medical researchers an important tool in determining which treatments work, and which do not.

Randomized trials are conducted by dividing patient populations into two groups, where one group receives the intervention to be studied while the other does not. Examining the differences between groups in these types of trials has ushered in an era of evidence-based medicine that continues to guide clinical practice on a daily basis.

"I think this is huge," Baker said. "This is really what's changed how we deal with cancer and lots of other disease, too. In the future we'll look back at this as a huge step forward."

Radiologic Imaging

Before the development of radiologic imaging technologies, beginning with the use of the X-ray, doctors were usually relegated to looking only for external signs of injury or damage.

Today, the ability to peer inside the body and determine the cause, extent, or presence of disease has revolutionized the very way medicine operates and has saved countless lives in the process.

Much of the initial work surrounding the discovery of X-rays was done by Roentgen, a German physicist in the late 1800s. Initially, they were viewed as an invasion of privacy rather than a life-saving tool.

Its utility was soon realized, however, and many additional imaging technologies eventually followed.

"CT scans didn't come into the picture until the 1970s," Baker said, adding that this technology was brought to us by the company BMI -- the same BMI which had previously made a fortune off the British band known as the Beatles.

Advancements in Childbirth

Up until the middle of the 20th century in the United States, childbirth was considered to be the most feared part of a woman's life.

"Go into any old graveyard, and you always see a number of women who died in their 20s," Baker said. "That was in a large part due to childbirth."

With the advent of techniques in anesthesia, cesarean section, and forceps delivery, the chances of a successful have pregnancy improved, at least in developed countries. Unfortunately, many resource-poor societies around the world still lag behind in this arena.

Organ Transplantation

Few surgical interventions today carry as much complexity -- or as much ethical significance -- as organ transplantation.

"It's such a technically complex intervention that it's an amazing thing that it can even be done," Baker said. "It ties together both surgery and immunology."

The first successful transplant operation, which took place in 1954, removed a kidney from one donor and installed it in the body of his identical twin. Other organ transplants followed, including the first liver transplant in 1967 and the first heart transplant in 1968.

Today, there are more than 90,000 people awaiting a transplant in the United States alone -- a situation that also reveals the moral considerations that come entwined with such techniques.

"It represented an important turning point in the field of medical ethics," Baker said. "It really challenged physicians' ethic of 'first, do no harm.'"

What's Next?

Considering the progress that has been made in years past, it is tempting to view the state of health and medicine today as an endpoint.

"Medicine has made it possible to deal with many conditions," Baker said. "Our lives are longer. Still, we have to say in all honesty that our control over chronic diseases is somewhat mixed."

Additional research into how best to stave off these conditions -- even by delving into the secrets of the human genome -- could represent the next hopeful steps toward healthier, longer lives.

"In the future, I think we will begin to see more and more applications from genomic medicine, which will help us identify individuals at risk for chronic diseases and allow us to intervene earlier," Baker said.

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Whether it's the technology that allows us to peer deep into the body or medicines that extend the lives of those with chronic diseases, it's easy to see how advances in health and medicine have touched the lives of nearly every person on the planet. Yet considering the ubiquitous nature of these...

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The most important difference between the world today and 150 years ago isn't airplane flight or nuclear weapons or the Internet. It's lifespan. We used to live 35 or 40 years on average in the United States, but now we live almost 80. We used to get one life. Now we get two.

You may well be living your second life already. Have you ever had some health problem that could have killed you if you'd been born in an earlier era? Leave aside for a minute the probabilistic ways you would have died in the past-the smallpox that didn't kill you because it was eradicated by a massive global vaccine drive, the cholera you never contracted because you drink filtered and chemically treated water. Did some specific medical treatment save your life? It's a fun conversation starter: Why are you not dead yet? It turns out almost everybody has a story, but we rarely hear them; life-saving treatments have become routine. I asked around, and here is a small sample of what would have killed my friends and acquaintances:

Adrian's lung spontaneously collapsed when he was 18.

Becky had an ectopic pregnancy that caused massive internal bleeding.

Carl had St. Anthony's Fire, a strep infection of the skin that killed John Stuart Mill.*

Dahlia would have died delivering a child (twice) or later of a ruptured gall bladder.

David had an aortic valve replaced.

Hanna acquired Type 1 diabetes during a pregnancy and would die without insulin.

Julia had a burst appendix at age 14.

Katherine was diagnosed with pernicious anemia in her 20s. She treats it with supplements of vitamin B-12, but in the past she would have withered away.

Laura (that's me) had scarlet fever when she was 2, which was once a leading cause of death among children but is now easily treatable with antibiotics.

Mitch was bitten by a cat (filthy animals) and had to have emergency surgery and a month of antibiotics or he would have died of cat scratch fever.

After a while, these not-dead-yet stories start to sound sort of absurd, like a giddy, hooray-for-modernity response to The Gashleycrumb Tinies. Edward Gorey's delightfully dark poem is an alphabetical list of children (fictional!) who died gruesome deaths: " A is for Amy who fell down the stairs/ B is for Basil assaulted by bears." Here's how modern science, medicine, and public health would amend it:

M is for Maud who was swept out to sea ... then brought back to shore by a lifeguard and resuscitated by emergency medical technicians.

O is for Olive run through with an awl ... but saved during a four-hour emergency surgery to repair her collapsed lung.

S is for Susan, who perished of fits ... or who would have, anyway, if her epilepsy hadn't been diagnosed promptly and treated with powerful anticonvulsant drugs.

Now we'd like to hear your stories. What would have killed you but didn't? Which friend or relative is alive today thanks to some medical intervention, whether heroic or trivial? Please send your stories to survival_stories@yahoo.com or share them on Twitter using the hashtag #NotDeadYet. We'll collect the best stories and publish them in next week, at the end of a series of articles about why life expectancy has increased. And congratulations on being alive!

When I first started looking into why average lifespan has increased so much so rapidly, I assumed there would be a few simple answers, a stepwise series of advances that each added a few years: clean water, sewage treatment, vaccines, various medical procedures. But it turns out the question of who or what gets credit for the doubling of life expectancy in the past few centuries is surprisingly contentious. The data are sparse before 1900, and there are rivalries between biomedicine and public health, obstetricians and midwives, people who say life expectancy will rise indefinitely and those who say it's starting to plateau.

It's important to assign the credit correctly. In much of the developing world, average lifespan hasn't increased nearly as dramatically as in the United States and the rest of the developed world. (And the United States has a lousy life expectancy compared to other wealthy nations.) Even within the United States, there are huge differences among races, geographic regions, and social classes. Even neighborhoods. These discrepancies are among the greatest injustices of the 21 st century. How can we prevent needless premature deaths? What interventions are mostly likely to grant people in poorer countries extra years? And what's the best way to prolong life and health even further in rich countries?

Courtesy of Work Projects Administration Poster Collection/Library of Congress

To understand why people live so long today, it helps to start with how people died in the past. (To take a step back in time, play our interactive game.) People died young, and they died painfully of consumption (tuberculosis), quinsy (tonsillitis), fever, childbirth, and worms. There's nothing like looking back at the history of death and dying in the United States to dispel any romantic notions you may have that people used to live in harmony with the land or be more in touch with their bodies. Life was miserable-full of contagious disease, spoiled food, malnutrition, exposure, and injuries.

But disease was the worst. The vast majority of deaths before the mid-20 th century were caused by microbes-bacteria, amoebas, protozoans, or viruses that ruled the Earth and to a lesser extent still do. It's not always clear which microbes get the credit for which kills. Bills of mortality (lists of deaths by causes) were kept in London starting in the 1600s and in certain North American cities and parishes starting in the 1700s. At the time, people thought fevers were spread by miasmas (bad air) and the treatment of choice for pretty much everything was blood-letting. So we don't necessarily know what caused "inflammatory fever" or what it meant to die of "dropsy" (swelling), or whether ague referred to typhoid fever, malaria, or some other disease. Interpreting these records has become a fascinating sub-field of history. But overall, death was mysterious, capricious, and ever-present.

The first European settlers to North America mostly died of starvation, with (according to some historians) a side order of stupidity. They picked unnecessary fights with Native Americans, sought gold and silver rather than planting food or fishing, and drank foul water. As Charles Mann points out in his fascinating book 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, one-third of the first three waves of colonists were gentlemen, meaning their status was defined by not having to perform manual labor. During the winter of 1609-10, aka " the starving time," almost everyone died; those who survived engaged in cannibalism.

Deadly diseases infiltrated North America faster than Europeans did. Native Americans had no exposure and thus no resistance to the common European diseases of childhood, and unimaginable pandemics of smallpox, measles, typhus, and other diseases swept throughout the continent and ultimately reduced the population by as much as 95 percent.

The slave trade killed more than 1 million Africans who were kidnapped, shackled, and shipped across the Atlantic. Those who survived the journey were at risk of dying from European diseases, as well as starvation and abuse. The slave trade introduced African microbes to North America; malaria and yellow fever were the ones that killed the most.

Global trade introduced new diseases around the world and caused horrific epidemics until the 1700s or so, when pretty much every germ had made landfall on every continent. Within the United States, better transportation in the 1800s brought wave after wave of disease outbreaks to new cities and the interior. Urbanization brought people into ideal proximity from a germ's point of view, as did factory work. Sadly, so did public schools: Children who might have toiled in relative epidemiological isolation on farms were suddenly coughing all over one another in enclosed schoolrooms.

One of the best tours of how people died in the past is The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America by Gerald Grob. It's a great antidote to all the heroic pioneer narratives you learned in elementary school history class, and it makes the Little House on the Prairie books seem delusional in retrospect. Pioneers traveling west in wagon trains had barely enough food, and much of it spoiled; their water came from stagnant, larvae-infested ponds. They died in droves of dysentery. Did you ever play with Lincoln logs or dream about living in a log cabin? What a fun fort for grown-ups, right? Wrong. The poorly sealed, damp, unventilated houses were teeming with mosquitoes and vermin. Because of settlement patterns along waterways and the way people cleared the land, some of the most notorious places for malaria in the mid-1800s were Ohio and Michigan. Everybody in the Midwest had the ague!

How did we go from the miseries of the past to our current expectation of long and healthy lives? "Most people credit medical advances," says David Jones, a medical historian at Harvard-"but most historians would not." One problem is the timing. Most of the effective medical treatments we recognize as saving our lives today have been available only since World War II: antibiotics, chemotherapy, drugs to treat high blood pressure. But the steepest increase in life expectancy occurred from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. Even some dramatically successful medical treatments such as insulin for diabetics have kept individual people alive-send in those #NotDeadYet stories!-but haven't necessarily had a population-level impact on average lifespan. We'll examine the second half of the 20 th century in a later story, but for now let's look at the bigger early drivers of the doubled lifespan.

The credit largely goes to a wide range of public health advances, broadly defined, some of which were explicitly aimed at preventing disease, others of which did so only incidentally. "There was a whole suite of things that occurred simultaneously," says S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity researcher at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Mathematically, the interventions that saved infants and children from dying of communicable disease had the greatest impact on lifespan. (During a particularly awful plague in Europe, James Riley points out in Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History, the average life expectancy could temporarily drop by five years.) And until the early 20 th century, the most common age of death was in infancy.

Clean water may be the biggest lifesaver in history. Some historians attribute one-half of the overall reduction in mortality, two-thirds of the reduction in child mortality, and three-fourths of the reduction in infant mortality to clean water. In 1854, John Snow traced a cholera outbreak in London to a water pump next to a leaky sewer, and some of the big public works projects of the late 1900s involved separating clean water from dirty. Cities ran water through sand and gravel to physically trap filth, and when that didn't work (germs are awfully small) they started chlorinating water.

Closely related were technologies to move wastewater away from cities, but as Grob points out in The Deadly Truth, the first sewage systems made the transmission of fecal-borne diseases worse. Lacking an understanding of germs, people thought that dilution was the best solution and just piped their sewage into nearby waterways. Unfortunately, the sewage outlets were often near the water system inlets. Finally understanding that sewage and drinking water need to be completely separated, Chicago built a drainage canal that in 1900 reversed the flow of the Chicago River. The city thus sent its sewage into the greater Mississippi watershed and continued taking its drinking water from Lake Michigan.

The germ theory of disease didn't catch on all that quickly, but once it did, people started washing their hands. Soap became cheaper and more widespread, and people suddenly had a logical reason to wash up before surgery, after defecating, before eating. Soap stops both deadly and lingering infections; even today, kids who don't have access to soap and clean water have stunted growth.

Housing, especially in cities, was crowded, filthy, poorly ventilated, dank, stinky, hot in the summer, and cold in the winter. These were terrible conditions to live in as a human being, but a great place to be an infectious microbe. Pretty much everyone was infected with tuberculosis (the main cause of consumption), the leading killer for most of the 19 th century. It still has a bit of a reputation as a disease of the young, beautiful, and poetic (it claimed Frederic Chopin and Henry David Thoreau, not to mention Mimì in ), but it was predominantly a disease of poverty, and there was nothing romantic about it. As economic conditions started improving in the 19 th century, more housing was built, and it was airier, brighter (sunlight kills tuberculosis bacteria), more weather-resistant, and less hospitable to vermin and germs.

We live like kings today-we have upholstered chairs, clean beds, a feast's worth of calories at any meal, all the nutmeg ( people once killed for it) and salt we could ever want. But wealth and privilege didn't save royalty from early deaths. Microbes do care about breeding-some people have evolved defenses against cholera, malaria, and possibly the plague-but microbes killed off people without regard to class distinctions through the 1600s in Europe. The longevity gap between the rich and the poor grew slowly with the introduction of effective health measures that only the rich could afford: Ipecac from the New World to stop bloody diarrhea, condoms made of animal intestines to prevent the transmission of syphilis, quinine from the bark of the cinchona tree to treat malaria. Once people realized citrus could prevent scurvy, the wealthy built orangeries -greenhouses where they grew the life-saving fruit.

Improving the standard of living is one important life-extending factor. The earliest European settlers in North America suffered from mass starvation initially, but once the Colonies were established, they had more food and better nutrition than people in England. During the Revolutionary War era, American soldiers were a few inches taller than their British foes. In Europe, the wealthy were taller than the poor, but there were no such class-related differences in America-which means most people had enough to eat. This changed during the 1800s, when the population expanded and immigrants moved to urban areas. Average height declined, but farmers were taller than laborers. People in rural areas outlived those in cities by about 10 years, largely due to less exposure to contagious disease but also because they had better nutrition. Diseases of malnutrition were common among the urban poor: scurvy (vitamin C deficiency), rickets (vitamin D deficiency), and pellagra (a niacin deficiency). Improved nutrition at the end of the 1800s made people taller, healthier, and longer lived; fortified foods reduced the incidence of vitamin-deficiency disorders.

Contaminated food was one of the greatest killers, especially of infants; once they stopped breast-feeding, their food could expose them to typhoid fever, botulism, salmonella, and any number of microbes that caused deadly diarrhea in young children. (Death rates for infants were highest in the summer, evidence that they were dying of food contaminated by microbes that thrive in warm conditions.) Refrigeration, public health drives for pure and pasteurized milk, and an understanding of germ theory helped people keep their food safe. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 made it a crime to sell adulterated food, introduced labeling laws, and led to government meat inspection and the creation of the Food and Drug Administration.

People had started finding ways to fight disease epidemics in the early 1700s, mostly by isolating the sick and inoculating the healthy. The United States suffered fewer massive epidemics than Europe did, where bubonic plague (the Black Death) periodically burned through the continent and killed one-third of the population. Low population density prevented most epidemics from becoming widespread early in the United States history, but epidemics did cause mass deaths locally, especially as the population grew and more people lived in crowded cities. Yellow fever killed hundreds of people in Savannah in 1820 and 1854; the first devastating cholera epidemic hit the country in 1832. Port cities suffered some of the worst outbreaks because sailors brought new diseases and strains with them from all over the world. Port cities instituted quarantines starting in the 19 th century, preventing sailors from disembarking if there was any evidence of disease, and on land, quarantines separated contagious people from the uninfected.

A smallpox epidemic in Boston in 1721 led to a huge debate about variolation, a technique that involved transferring pus from an infected person to a healthy one to cause a minor reaction that confers immunity. Rev. Cotton Mather was for it-he said it was a gift from God. Those opposed said that disease was God's will. People continued to fight about variolation, then inoculation (with the related cowpox virus, introduced in the late 1700s), and finally vaccination. The fight over God's will and the dangers of vaccinations (real in the past, imaginary today) are still echoing.

In the early 1900s, antitoxins to treat diphtheria and vaccines against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis helped stop these deadly diseases, followed by vaccines for mumps, measles, polio, and rubella.

Anne Schuchat, assistant surgeon general and the acting director of CDC's Center for Global Health, says it's not just the scientific invention of vaccines that saved lives, but the "huge social effort to deliver them to people improved health, extended life, and kept children alive." Vaccines have almost eliminated diseases that used to be common killers, but she points out that "they're still circulating in other parts of the world, and if we don't continue to vaccinate, they could come back."

Courtesy of Sandra W. Roush, Trudy V. Murphy, and the Vaccine-Preventable Disease Table Working Group/ Journal of the American Medical Association

Vaccines have been so effective that most people in the developed world don't know what it's like to watch a child die of pertussis or measles, but parents whose children have contracted these diseases because of anti-vaccine paranoia can tell them. "The mistake that we made was that we underestimated the diseases and we totally overestimated the adverse reactions [to vaccines]," says a father in New Zealand whose child almost died of an agonizing bout of tetanus.

Schuchat says the HPV vaccine is a huge priority now; only one-third of teenage girls have received the full series of three shots required to protect them against viruses that cause cervical cancer. The vaccines "are highly effective and very safe, but our uptake is horrible. Thousands of cases of cervical cancer will occur in a few decades in people who are girls now."

Some credit for the historical decrease in deadly diseases may go to the disease agents themselves. The microbes that cause rheumatic fever, scarlet fever, and a few other diseases may have evolved to become less deadly. Evolutionarily, that makes sense-it's no advantage to a parasite to kill its own host, and less-deadly strains may have spread more readily in the human population. Of course, sudden evolutionary change in microbes can go the other way, too: The pandemic influenza of 1918-19 was a new strain that killed more people than any disease outbreak in history-around 50 million. In any battle between microbes and mammals, the smart money is on the microbes.

Over the next week, we'll take a closer look at deaths in childbirth and changes in life expectancy in adulthood. We'll examine the evolution of old age and the social repercussions of having infants that survive and a robust population of old people, and we'll list some of the oddball, underappreciated innovations that may have saved your life. In the meantime, please play the Wretched Fate game and send us your #NotDeadYet survival stories on Twitter or survival_stories@yahoo.com.
Please read the rest of Laura Helmuth's series on longevity, and play our "Wretched Fate" interactive game to learn how you would have died in 1890.
Correction, Sept. 5, 2013: This article originally misspelled John Stuart Mill's middle name.

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You Used to Get One Life. Now You Get Two. #NotDeadYet

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The most important difference between the world today and 150 years ago isn't airplane flight or nuclear weapons or the Internet. It's lifespan. We used to live 35 or 40 years on average in the United States, but now we live almost 80. We used to get one life.

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Prosthetic Technology and Human Enhancement: Benefits, Concerns and Regulatory Schemes Pt1

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Prosthetic devices have helped restore functionality in humans who suffer from diseases requiring amputation or from limbs lost in battle for over three thousand years. I will begin this paper by explaining some of that historical journey. Next, I will highlight a few of the prosthetic devices available today to demonstrate that much, but not all, of that functionality can now be restored.

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Advancements in Tech and Change in Human Behaviors

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Advancements in Tech and Change in Human Behaviors

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The Evolution of Technology and the Human Race

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Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images
Technology has the potential to radically change the way we live, and even how we relate to each other as human beings.

Self-driving cars are changing how we get around.

We're already seeing Google's self-driving cars every now and then on the road in California, where Google is testing its driverless car program. But they could be on the market by 2018.

Google estimates that self-driving vehicles could cut the 1.2 million lives lost every year due to car accidents in half.

Whether society is ready for this or not still remains to be seen. But driverless cars will most definitely be an option. Other big players like Toyota and Audi are also working on their own self-driving cars.

Google Glass will turn us all into cyborgs.

Google Glass, the search giant's Internet-connected glasses, is one of the most exciting products to come around in a while. That's because the implications are huge.

Glass will bring everyday activities closer to our senses, and enhance our interactions with our surroundings. We'll be more connected to the Internet than we ever have before and we'll be able to see useful information like text messages, news articles, tweets, and directions overlaid onto the real world.

With Glass, we can also record everything around us and store it to the cloud. That way we can make sure we don't forget a single moment of life.

Wearable fitness trackers are making us all health nuts.

With apps and services like Nike FuelBand, Fitbit, and ZEO, we're increasingly generating more and more data in our day-to-day lives. Those devices help us track things like calories burned, steps taken, and even how well we're sleeping.

These devices are all part of the "quantified self" movement, which aims to empower people through their own data, telling us things about ourselves and our biology that aren't obvious.

The Internet is fueling a sharing economy.

There's now a slew of startups in the sharing economy, where people are renting out their houses, cars, parking spots, camping tents, and much more.

There's Airbnb for renting apartments, Rent the Runway for temporary ownership of high fashion clothes and accessories, SideCar for instant ride sharing - the list goes on.

But none of that would be possible, and not nearly as easy, without the Internet acting as a matchmaker.

Robots are changing the workforce.

Affordable, industrial robots that can perform a variety of simple tasks and work safely alongside human workers are starting to emerge in the U.S.

Rethink Robotics's first robot, Baxter, can handle materials, load and unload items on/off from conveyor belts, inspect and test parts, lightly operate machines, and pack and unpack boxes.

Rethink Robotics is aiming to make America more competitive by creating low cost manufacturing techniques and processes. If all goes according to plan, Baxter should be able to work alongside human coworkers and help America better compete against low-wage offshore labor.

The ultimate goal for Baxter is to accomplish more difficult tasks, like fitting together parts on an electronics assembly line. It's also working on software to let Baxter communicate with a conveyor belt, and other machines.

Smartphones keep us hyper connected with each other.

Smartphones are incredibly useful tools for staying connected to what's going on all over the world.

Mobile phones keep us connected to email, news, stocks - you name it. Maps ensure that we never get lost, as long as we have a signal. Meanwhile, dating apps like Tinder and Grindr are helping us meet new people nearby.

But how often we check our phones is slightly disturbing. Within the first fifteen minutes of waking up, 79% of smartphones users look at their phones, according to a recent IDC study. 48% use their smartphones at the gym and 50% of smartphone users check Facebook in movie theaters.

Text messaging has also become more commonplace than making phone calls, so we're communicating less with our voices and more with our strategically crafted written words.

Social networks are changing how we interact with each other.

Facebook and Twitter provide platforms for us to keep up with what our friends, family, and even strangers are doing all over the world.

At the same time, social media is helping fuel social activism, as it provides a way for people to connect over common causes and ambitions.

Social media played a huge role in the Arab Spring, as protestors took to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to update the world in real-time of the events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain.

In the early stages, activists relied heavily on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to accelerate the movement. With YouTube, protestors were able to upload and share videos featuring protest and political commentary. Many of those videos ended up going viral, with the top ones receiving nearly 5.5 million views each

3D printing is reinventing the way we manufacture goods, while also fueling creativity.

3D printing is making manufacturing more accessible to the masses and even fueling major breakthroughs in medicine. Just this month, a 3D printer made the tiniest human liver ever.

A 3D printer builds objects piece by piece in three dimensions. These devices are popping up in people's homes with companies like MakerBot, Printrbot, and Shapeways creating affordable 3D printers.

The availability of 3D printers has even spurred a marketplace dedicated to 3D-printed objects. So now we have an entirely new way of producing and consuming products thanks to 3D printing.

Nano-filtration technology is helping hundreds of thousands of people produce and drink clean water.

Unsanitary water is a huge health risk. Roughly 3.4 million people die each year from water-related disease, according to the World Health Organization.

That's where Lifesaver comes in. Lifesaver is a water bottle that uses nano-filtration technology to purify water. It removes bacteria, viruses, cysts, parasites, fungi, and other microbiological waterborne pathogens.

Gesture-controlled devices are awakening our senses and fueling collaboration.

Computer mouses are becoming a bit passé. New technologies are popping up that allow you to interact with your computer just by waving your hand. With Leap Motion, using natural hand gestures instead of a mouse allows you to better shape your ideas on to the screen.

Another technology called MYO by Thalmic Labs is an armband that enables you to control other devices using your movements, and without the need for a camera, unlike Leap Motion.

The MYO armband works by sensing the electrical activity in your muscles to control your computer, video games, or even a drone.

Touchscreen devices and Wi-Fi in underground transportation systems will vastly improve how we get around.

New York City is planning to install at least 77 new touchscreen kiosks in subway stations throughout its five boroughs.

The new displays will feature subway planning tools, information about service updates and delays, as well as advertisements.

Each 47-inch touchscreen will be packed with sensors, video cameras, microphones, and Wi-Fi to facilitate communication between subway riders and the MTA. In the future, Control Group envisions sponsored experiences making their way to the touchscreens, like streaming media or even a networked game of Jeopardy.

Meanwhile, New York is also rolling out Wi-Fi in its subway stations so people can continue to text and make phones calls while waiting for the train. But Bay Area Rapid Transit in the San Francisco Bay Area has taken it a step further. It already allows you to use your phone's wireless connection in the tunnels, and might soon roll out free Wi-Fi.

iPads and mobile phones are changing our retail experience.

We once relied solely on human interaction in retail stores-with a little catalog shopping on the side. Those days are approaching an end as companies like Apple allow you to pay for a purchase and walk out of a store without talking to anyone.

Apple stores can sometimes get so crowded that it's hard to find a clerk to check you out. That's why the EasyPay app lets you buy items like chargers, cases, and software without needing to interact with anyone in the store.

The rise of tablets has also been instrumental in revamping the retail experience, with many brick-and-mortar businesses using the tablet as a kind of mobile cash register for ringing up sales. Square, for example, has allowed retailers to completely ditch traditional checkout methods. Its card reader and Register app allow merchants to accept credit- or debit-card payments using an iPhone, iPad, or Android device.

Smartphone apps are making us the ultimate consumer but also kind of lazy.

It's hard to believe the impact apps have had on society. Apple's famous line "There's an app for that" is not an overstatement. It's pretty much true.

Tech companies are constantly developing new apps to make our lives easier. Fantastical is one of the best calendar apps out there right now, Evernote ensures you always have all of your notes with you, no matter what device you're on, and Uber usually comes through for you when you can't find a cab.

But apps can also fuel laziness and unnecessary spending. With restaurant delivery service Seamless, you could theoretically never leave your house and stay nourished for the rest of your life. The same goes for grocery delivery app FreshDirect.

Photo-sharing sites are changing our notion of privacy.

Facebook and Instagram have spurred an oversharing economy where we willingly post images of ourselves and friends doing everything from eating lunch to running around naked on a private beach.

When we choose to use products and services like Facebook, Instagram, and even Flickr, we end up leaving behind a huge trail of personal information that will forever remain on the Internet.

Self-destructing photo app Snapchat relatively recently launched to solve that problem. But there is still a risk in sharing photos that you wouldn't want other people to see.

And speaking of privacy, the drones are coming.

The use of drones by government and law enforcement agencies has stirred up privacy concerns, but some say that we really shouldn't be afraid of drones.

The creation of smartphones has led to advanced technology, like gyroscopes, accelerometers, armed processors, and GPS, that make it possible to produce cheap, functioning autopilots.

People are already using drones to do things like find hikers and skiers in need of rescuing, take aerial imagery of homes and other properties, and survey archaeological sites in Africa.

Already, companies like FedEx are counting the days until drones are admitted to standard US airspace. The FAA will officially allow the commercial use of drones starting in 2015, but the drones cannot fly higher than 400 feet above the ground and must be at least five miles away from any airport.

Now, check out Whisper, the app that has taken college campuses by storm

More: Features Google Glass Robots Augmented reality

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15 Ways Technology Is Reinventing Society

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Technology has the potential to radically change the way we live, and even how we relate to each other as human beings. Self-driving cars are changing how we get around. We're already seeing Google's self-driving cars every now and then on the road in California, where Google is testing its driverless car program.

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Technology has progressed by leaps and bounds in the last few decades, and the benefits of technology are there for all to see. One of the biggest arguments against technology is its sometimes ridiculously high cost which limits its usage and places it out of reach of many people. But it is an undeniable fact that technology has helped us make many tasks easier, and it has also made the world a much smaller place. Benefits of RFID Technology will also be an interesting read.

The latest developments in technology can be seen and felt in many industries, but there are some areas that have been benefited more than others. Costs of production have fallen, networking has become easier, employment levels have risen (in some cases), and we have certainly become more efficient at many complex tasks and processes. With this in mind, let's look at some of the most obvious benefits of technology that we live with today.

Technology's Benefits

Healthcare
Perhaps the single biggest beneficiary of advancing technology has been the healthcare sector. Medical research has led to the end of many diseases and ailments, and also to the discovery of many drugs and medications that have helped prevent many lethal diseases and disorders. Personal records are easier to study now, and medical research has advanced magnificently. Millions of lives have been saved as a result of this. Here are some of the benefits of technology in this industry in brief.

Communication between patients and doctors has become easier, more personal, more flexible and more sensitive.

Personal records of patients are maintained, which makes it easier to study symptoms and carry out diagnosis of previously unexplainable conditions.

Several medical aids have helped people overcome many medical conditions which they had to live with earlier.

New medicines have led to the demise of many illnesses and diseases.

Medical research has become supremely advanced, and every ailment seemingly has a cure, or at least a prevention.

Costs of medical procedures and operations have fallen dramatically over the decades. positive effects of technology on society.

Education
It is no surprise that the benefits of technology in the classroom and the benefits of technology in schools have opened up a whole new learning environment. Knowledge can be easily procured with the help of Internet technology now, and it is easier to help children with special needs as well. Here are some more benefits of assistive technology that the educational sector has witnessed.

Personalized learning has come to the fore. Students can pick their own curriculum with ease, and set their own personal targets.

Distance learning has become much easier, and this has led to a rise in the number of people who receive education.

E-learning and online education has made it very simple and systematic for an individual to receive personal attention, so that all his specific needs are fulfilled.

Immediate response to queries and tests have made the whole education process a lot faster.

The use of computers and technology in classrooms has opened up a whole new method of teaching and effective learning.

Communication
The communication industry has witnessed a huge growth. Social networking and blogging has opened up a whole new world to people from remote locations, and the reach of the mass media has increased thousandfold. People can communicate with each other on the move, and there are no limitations anymore to the benefits of information technology. Here are some more benefits.

The speed of talking to one another is instantaneous.

The mode of talking has become more personalized and can be done from just about anywhere.

The world has become a smaller place, since no one is out of reach anymore.

The clarity ofcommunication has also improved with improvements in audio quality and video quality.

Information and news broadcasting has become more personalized as well. Moreover, it can reach more people at a faster speed, and people's response can also be felt immediately.

Business
Companies have become more profitable with the help of various advanced machines and equipment, and this has led to a rise in the standard of living of people. The national income of countries has also expanded as a result of this.

Costs of production have fallen dramatically thanks to automated processes.

Research and development has become far more advanced than ever, and this leads to the invention of ground breaking technology.

Company accounts and customer records can be easily stored and accessed, and this increases the market penetration of the business.

Global collaborations and partnerships are easier to start and maintain, and this benefits everyone involved with international business.

It has become easier to combat competition, and this has led to more choice for the consumer.

All of these benefits of technology are there for everyone to see. Even though there are certain repercussions and a negative impact of technology as well, nobody can say that technology has not aided society on a whole. The world is a better place thanks to technology, and the future looks much brighter, thanks to these advancements.
By Rahul Thadani

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Technology has progressed by leaps and bounds in the last few decades, and the benefits of technology are there for all to see. One of the biggest arguments against technology is its sometimes ridiculously high cost which limits its usage and places it out of reach of many people.

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Advancements in Tech and Change in Human Behaviors

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Advancements in Tech and Change in Human Behaviors

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So many new technologies have appeared in the past half century that it's impossible to list them all. But these 10 high-tech breakthroughs stand out over the last 50 years because they've revolutionized the way Americans live. We look back at their beginnings, as well as where they've taken us today.

10. Organ transplants. In 1954, Dr Joseph Murray removed the kidney from one human patient and implanted it in another. The recipient accepted the kidney as its own rather than rejecting it as a foreign body. It was more than skillful surgery: Murray had chosen a pair of identical twins, Ronald Herrick and his terminally ill brother Richard, in hopes their similar genetic makeup would reduce the likelihood of Richard's body rejecting Ronald's liver. Soon afterward, though, other researchers developed drugs that could squelch a transplant recipient's immune system long enough for the new organ to become incorporated into its new body. Today, some 25,000 Americans a year receive a new heart, kidney, liver, lung, pancreas or intestine - and a new lease on life.

9. Robots and artificial intelligence. The term "robot" was coined by Czechoslovakian playwright Karel Capek in 1920 - "robota" being a Czech word for tedious labor - but the first real industrial robot was built in 1954 by George Devol. Five years later, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology founded its Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in a quest to mechanically mimic human minds as well as hands. Today, robots assemble products better, faster and often cheaper than manual laborers, while more than 8 million U.S. airline flights a year are scheduled, guided and flown with the superhuman assistance of advanced software. Still, some Americans eye such systems with the cynical view of novelist Kurt Vonnegut, whose 1952 story "Player Piano" warned that the machines might leave people without a purpose - or a job.

8. Electronic funds transfer. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco set up a paperless transfer system with the Los Angeles branch in 1972. By the end of the decade, instantaneous transfers of millions of dollars in value between banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions had become common. The real appeal of EFT today is its trickle down to the individual: You get grab cash from your bank account anywhere in the world, and use PayPal to buy and sell stuff on eBay without sending money or checks through the mail.

7. Nuclear power. When the Queen herself threw the switch on the world's first atomic power plant at Calder Hall outside London in 1956, nuclear reactors were seen as a source of cheap, pollution-free energy. But a partial meltdown in 1979 at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania soured Americans on nukes as safe power. Nonetheless, the United States today has about 100 active plants that generate 20 percent of the country's electricity - second only to coal as a source of power - and have been steadily increasing their capacity. Will the next 50 years bring a better alternative?

6. Mobile phones. The idea for cellular phone service dates back at least to 1947, but the first call was made from the sidewalk outside the Manhattan Hilton in 1973 by Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher who rang up his rival at AT&T Bell Labs to test the new phone. Thirty years later, more than half of all Americans own one and cellular networks are beginning to serve Internet access at broadband speeds through thin air.

5. Space flight. Americans from 50 years ago would be disappointed to learn we never went further than the Moon - no Mars colony, no 2001 odyssey to Jupiter, no speed-of-light spaceships. Even the Shuttle is in trouble. But the space race against the Russians that dominated the national psyche (and a good chunk of the budget) in the '60s and '70s pushed the development of hundreds of enabling technologies, including synthetic fibers and integrated computer circuits, necessary to fly men to the Moon and back. And the astronauts brought back a lesson from space: "We saw the earth the size of a quarter, and we realized then that there is only one earth. We are all brothers."

4. Personal computers. Before IBM recast the desktop computer from hobbyist's gadget to office automation tool in 1983 - followed by Apple's people-friendly Macintosh a year later - a "minicomputer" was the size of a washing machine and required a special air-conditioned room. But the trained technicians who operated the old mainframes already knew computers were cool: They could use them to play games, keep diaries, and trade messages with friends across the country, while still looking busy. Today, thanks to the PC, we all look busy.

3. Digital media. "The camera doesn't lie" went a saying not heard much since the release of Photoshop 1.0 in 1990. Digitized audio, pictures, movies, and text let even an amateur edit reality - or conjure it from scratch - with a keyboard and a mouse. A singer's bad notes, a model's blemishes, or an overcast sky in a movie scene can be fixed as easily as a spelling error. Just as important, digital media can be copied over and over nearly for free, stored permanently without fading, and sent around the world in seconds. It rightly worries the movie and music industries, but how do you put the genie back in the bottle if there's no bottle anymore?

2. Genetic engineering. Everyone knows Watson and Crick, who unraveled the secret of DNA in 1953. But have you heard of Boyer and Cohen, who constructed the first organism with combined DNA from different species in 1973? They inserted toad genes into a bacterium that then replicated itself over and over, passing the toad's genetic code down through generations of bacteria. Thirty years later, an estimated 70 percent of processed foods contain genetically modified ingredients, such as soybeans or corn engineered for higher crop yields. Of course, the much bigger potential - good and bad - is in engineering humans. It might prevent birth defects, and diseases later in life. But the side effects could be disastrous and unknown. Is there an ethical way to beta-test human beings?

1. The Internet. This one seems like a no-brainer, but the Net's unique strength is that no two people will agree on why it's so important. The world's largest and most unruly library, it's also a global news channel, social club, research archive, shopping service, town hall, and multimedia kiosk. Add to that the most affordable mass medium ever, and a curse to anyone with a secret to keep. Three-fifths of Americans now use the Net, but it remains to be seen whether the connections to one another will transform us, or prove that we'll never change.
Paul Boutin is a technology writer for Wired magazine and Slate. He has worked as a software engineer and manager at MIT and in Silicon Valley.

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So many new technologies have appeared in the past half century that it's impossible to list them all. But these 10 high-tech breakthroughs stand out over the last 50 years because they've revolutionized the way Americans live. We look back at their beginnings, as well as where they've taken us today.

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The Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, and with the explosion of wireless communication in the early twenty-first century, we can say that humankind is now almost entirely connected, albeit with great levels of inequality in bandwidth, efficiency, and price.

People, companies, and institutions feel the depth of this technological change, but the speed and scope of the transformation has triggered all manner of utopian and dystopian perceptions that, when examined closely through methodologically rigorous empirical research, turn out not to be accurate. For instance, media often report that intense use of the Internet increases the risk of isolation, alienation, and withdrawal from society, but available evidence shows that the Internet neither isolates people nor reduces their sociability; it actually increases sociability, civic engagement, and the intensity of family and friendship relationships, in all cultures.

Our current "network society" is a product of the digital revolution and some major sociocultural changes. One of these is the rise of the "Me-centered society," marked by an increased focus on individual growth and a decline in community understood in terms of space, work, family, and ascription in general. But individuation does not mean isolation, or the end of community. Instead, social relationships are being reconstructed on the basis of individual interests, values, and projects. Community is formed through individuals' quests for like-minded people in a process that combines online interaction with offline interaction, cyberspace, and the local space.

View other articles provided by BBVA OpenMind:

* The Way of the Dodo * A Revolution in Business
* Banking, Information, and Technology: Toward Knowledge Banking
* Cyber Attacks

Globally, time spent on social networking sites surpassed time spent on e-mail in November 2007, and the number of social networking users surpassed the number of e-mail users in July 2009. Today, social networking sites are the preferred platforms for all kinds of activities, both business and personal, and sociability has dramatically increased - but it is a different kind of sociability. Most Facebook users visit the site daily, and they connect on multiple dimensions, but only on the dimensions they choose. The virtual life is becoming more social than the physical life, but it is less a virtual reality than a real virtuality, facilitating real-life work and urban living.

Because people are increasingly at ease in the Web's multidimensionality, marketers, government, and civil society are migrating massively to the networks people construct by themselves and for themselves. At root, social-networking entrepreneurs are really selling spaces in which people can freely and autonomously construct their lives. Sites that attempt to impede free communication are soon abandoned by many users in favor of friendlier and less restricted spaces.

Perhaps the most telling expression of this new freedom is the Internet's transformation of sociopolitical practices. Messages no longer flow solely from the few to the many, with little interactivity. Now, messages also flow from the many to the many, multimodally and interactively. By disintermediating government and corporate control of communication, horizontal communication networks have created a new landscape of social and political change.

Networked social movements have been particularly active since 2010, notably in the Arab revolutions against dictatorships and the protests against the management of the financial crisis. Online and particularly wireless communication has helped social movements pose more of a challenge to state power.

The Internet and the Web constitute the technological infrastructure of the global network society, and the understanding of their logic is a key field of research. It is only scholarly research that will enable us to cut through the myths surrounding this digital communication technology that is already a second skin for young people, yet continues to feed the fears and the fantasies of those who are still in charge of a society that they barely understand.
Read the full article here.
Manuel Castells is the Wallis Annenberg Chair Professor of Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is also Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley; director of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC); director of the Network Society Chair at the Collège d'études mondiales in Paris, and director of research in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. He is académico numerario of the Spanish Royal Academy of Economics and Finance, fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, fellow of the British Academy, and fellow of the Academia Europea. He was also a founding board member of the European Research Council and of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology of the European Commission. He received the Erasmus Medal in 2011, and the 2012 Holberg Prize. He has published 25 books, including the trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (Blackwell, 1996-2003), The Internet Galaxy (Oxford University Press, 2001), Communication Power (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Networks of Outrage and Hope (Polity Press, 2012).

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The Impact of the Internet on Society: A Global Perspective

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The Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, and with the explosion of wireless communication in the early twenty-first century, we can say that humankind is now almost entirely connected, albeit with great levels of inequality in bandwidth, efficiency, and price.

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Our personal life is highly dependent on the technology that people have developed. Technology has advanced with years and it has changed the way we purchase products , the way we live , the way we communicate , the way we travel , the way we learn and so many changes have been brought about by these continuous technological advancements. As people's demands and life style change, the demand for advancing the type of technology we use is high. Almost every thing we use has been innovated to better standards, a good example is the "Mobile Phone ", the type of mobile phones we had in 1995 are no longer on demand in this century, the demands of mobile phone users have changed greatly, and this has resulted in the advancement of mobile phone technologies.

Users of mobile phones demand simplicity and more functionality, which has forced mobile phone manufactures to develop computer minded smart phones, which are so easy to use, but also they come with more functionality compared to the type of mobile phones we used to have in the past.

Technological advancements have helped businesses and organizations save time and cost of production, which has been an advantage to all business, they manage these advancements to gain competitive advantage. A good a example is the 3G / 4G broadband, small businesses have taken advantage of this super fast internet to reach target markets with less costs of operation.

In the past, only big successful companies would dominate the market because they could afford the expensive adverting Medias, like Television, to reach any target market. Small businesses typically don't have fat budgets and find it hard to compete in any given profitable market. Now with advanced internet technologies, a small business can use most advanced internet marketing tools with a small budget which can range from $100 - $5000 to reach over 100,000 target customers.

The effects of technological advancement are both positive and negative. Positively, technology advancement has simplified the way we do things, it saves time, it increases on production, it simplifies communication, it has improved health care and it has also improved our educational environment. Negatively , technology advancement has made humans so lazy , technology users are so dependent on new advance tech tools , this laziness has resulted into less innovation , it has increased on health risks because technology users exercise less , it has affected the environment because of the increase pollution which has affected the Ozone layers which has resulted into global warming. When it comes to education, students are more dependent on Calculators and computers to solve simple equations; in this case they can not train their brains to solve a simple task which makes them lame in class. Below I have listed a few technological advancements which have changed our lives:

Technology Advancement in Medicine and Health care: Technology has helped in saving many innocent lives. Human medicine and health sciences have improved. Doctors and medical students have embarked on medical technological tools to carry out extensive research on human health problems and challenges. This extensive research has resulted into the development of new drugs, and treatments which have helped in curing most challenging human diseases and this has helped in saving so many lives and it has also prolonged the human lifespan. Let's look at some cool medical technological advancements and how they help us.

Fig 1: Smart phone Ultrasound: Using a $100,000 which was provided by , experts at the Washington University in St.Losuis managed to integrate a USB-based ultrasound probe with a Smart phone. The main goal was to create an simple hand sized "Ultrasound device " that can enable doctors in remote areas to image a patients kidney , liver , bladder , eyes , veins and arteries so that they can easily detect any infections. This type of device can be of a good use in many developing countries and it can help in saving lives. Doctors without boundaries can use this mobile ultra sound to help out many patients in remote areas.

Other health care technologies include; Nanocomposite Contact Lenses used to treat diabetes , Robotic Surgeons , Neuroprosthetic Chips which prevents seizures and control artificial limbs with mind , Multimodality Hybrid Imaging Technology which detects prostate cancer and Artificial Wombs which are used to grow an embryo outside of the body of a woman's body. Learn more about these medical technologies here

Technological advancements in communication: Communication is a major factor in both human lives and business. Communication technology has changed with years and it has even become better, I can tell what the future holds in this field of communication. In (fig 1) you can see a lady using a fixed land line to communicate, by then, this was the best way to communicate with your family, friends or business partners and suppliers. The only challenge it had was that it was fixed, so if you where not in the office or at home, people could not communicate with you. With years this technology has evolved and we have witnessed new mobile phones which made communication easier. In (fig 2) you can see two adults enjoy advanced communication technology (ipad) , this is a new technology , which can do more than just making calls. With its technology, you can even do a live video call and see the people you're communicating with, similar to Smart phones like iphone or Samsung galaxy which can have related functions.

Technological Advancements in Agriculture: Agricultural technological advancement has played a big role in changing the face of agriculture. This has resulted into increased production and abundant food supply. In (fig 2) you can see farmers in a developing world using poor methods or irrigating their plants. During droughts, crops will run out of water, so farmers have to irrigate their crops for a better yield, but with the type of irrigation method in fig 1, the crops will not yield well so the farmer will make a big loss. In fig 2, advanced sprinklers are used to irrigate a big farm and this saves the farmer time. A farmer who used this advanced technology will have a large output as well as produce high quality products. This is an automated water sprinkler, which can be set basing on the time of the day and movement of the sun, so the crops will always get sufficient water. Learn more on the use of technology in agriculture here >>>>

Other technological advances in agriculture include ; Agricultural Machinery , Agriculture Biotechnology , GM Food , Cloned Sheep , Organic fruits , Artificial Fruits , Livestock farming , Cattle Breeding , Cattle Slaughter Read more >>>

Technological Advancements In Education: Technology advancement has greatly changed the education sector. We now days learn through mobile gadgets and tablets. Technology has simplified the way teachers reach their students and it has also helped students learn from anywhere as well as enable them access academic information at any time from anywhere. Information is power, so both students and teachers can use advanced technologies for education to make research on subjects of interest. Some of the most popular technology advances which have changed the face of education include: Use of smart phones in classroom , use of tablets and mobile computers in education and classroom , use of smart whiteboards for visual illustration in the classroom, use of internet for long distance learning , Use of social ,media to connect students with teachers for example Piazza.com. Lets' look at the example in the images below. In (fig 1) , the teacher is using a black board and chalk to explain mathematical equations, this is the type of education most of us had, but some students could fail to learn because of its lack of real time visual illustration. In (fig2), the teacher is using a smart whiteboard which gives students visual illustrations on each subject; you can see that all students in the classroom are well engaged compared to a classroom with a black board. You can learn more about use of technology in the classroom here>>>>

Serious research has been undertaken to publish this content, so you're in the right place. I love technology, I believe embracing its potential for personal, business or educational advancement will pave the way forward for us all. We've all heard "knowledge is power", with this website I hope, to some degree, to empower you!

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Technological Advancements and Their Effects on Humanity - Use of Technology

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Our personal life is highly dependent on the technology that people have developed. Technology has advanced with years and it has changed the way we purchase products , the way we live , the way we communicate , the way we travel , the way we learn and so many changes have been brought about ...

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No one can deny that at how large scale technology is being used and how immensely it is affecting our daily life. We sincerely can't imagine our lives without technology now and that's a fact. We start off our days with technology and end up with it. There hardly is a thing or two we do without being in direct or indirect use of technology. Though there are some disadvantages we face and deal with but the benefits and uses are certainly greater than the disadvantages, even the drugs to cure our body have a bitter taste.

Here are some greatest benefits of technology in human life.

The greatest advantages of tech. are enjoyed by the economy. Since the World War II there was great advancement in the technology that ruled the world after world. The whole world is now getting benefits and of course that didn't stop there and that was a beginning of a WHOLE NEW WORLD. The benefits of technology that economy enjoys make our life easier, more served and healthy.

Business: The business sector got the advantage of communicating fast, management of humans and products both become easy due to new tech. tech. took place of human being that increase the returns and decrease the Cost of production.

Agriculture: No wonder we all see it, how the process of cultivation and harvesting become easier and faster and consequently production increases, which is much needed as the need of grains, vegetables etc is also increasing due to increase in world population.

Banks: Baking started from exchange of goods (Barter) when people made money out of things of value and it has reached the level of online banking that is also use of technology in this sector of economy.

Industry: The greatest impact of tech. is made on Industries. There was a time when people used to made things with their hands and now the fast and robotic machines have replaced those hands. Which undoubtedly have raised the standard and amount of produced good and time is saved.

Transportation: Transportation is something used in all fields of life and technology has made it quick as fire in woods. That saves time, lives, and make it easy to reach anywhere in whole world.

Death can't be avoided but with the new and advanced technology the lives are being saved, few people die before they should. The development in medicine department has made us live less painful life. In short, Human are more safe now than before when even a simple virus could kill us.

Technology has brought people closer, because of development in telecommunication and transportation the world now has become a Global Village. No distance has left and no boundaries are there to stop you seeing your loved ones.

Easy access to information is now possible due to internet that provides online books, notes, touring. For the people who find it hard to go to an educational institute can get help from online education.

Technology has totally changed the way of our living. Comparing the homes and home accessories and furniture then and now makes us realize in how much different and easier worlds we are living.

Reminder: the disadvantages of technology can be minimized depending on the how and how much we use it. Make the word a better place to live in.

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Benefits of Technology in Human Life - About Lifestyle & Life Issues

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No one can deny that at how large scale technology is being used and how immensely it is affecting our daily life. We sincerely can't imagine our lives without technology now and that's a fact. We start off our days with technology and end up with it.

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Technology advancements and their impact on business. Interview with Derek Kennedy BCG

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Some of you probably already know that leading a sedentary lifestyle where your fingers and eyes do the most of your work is not exactly the best thing for your health. But working on the Internet not only causes eye strain or bad posture, it also brings in a slew of other health hazards that is not as apparent.

This telling infographic by Insurance.com listed some other health hazards in the form of depression, cyberbullying, sleep deprivation, relationship stress and brain damage! Take a look at the some of the stats and percentages they shared and maybe re-evaluate the amount of time you spend on the Internet and in front of the computer.
Recommended Reading: 30 IPhone Apps To Help You Watch Your Health

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Is The Internet Bad For Your Health? [Infographic]

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Some of you probably already know that leading a sedentary lifestyle where your fingers and eyes do the most of your work is not exactly the best thing for your health. But working on the Internet not only causes eye strain or bad posture, it also brings in a slew of other health hazards that is not as apparent.

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Technology distraciton Op-ed Rough Draft (1)